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All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense
more than to the Intellectual.
Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them
elect to abide by that order and, their life throughout, make its
concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter of
sense are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if
they live along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the
other. And those of them that pretend to reasoning have adopted
this as their philosophy; they are like the heavier birds which
have incorporated much from the earth and are so weighted down
that they cannot fly high for all the wings Nature has given
them.
Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the
better in their soul urges them from the pleasant to the nobler,
but they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair
of any surer ground, they fall back in virtue's name, upon those
actions and options of the lower from which they sought to
escape.
But there is a third order- those godlike men who, in their
mightier power, in the keenness of their sight, have clear vision
of the splendour above and rise to it from among the cloud and
fog of earth and hold firmly to that other world, looking beyond
all here, delighted in the place of reality, their native land,
like a man returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways
of his own country.
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